Certificate Authority Gave Out Certs For GitHub To Someone Who Just Had A GitHub Account

from the oops dept

For many years now, we've talked about the many different problems today's web security system has based on the model of security certificates issued by Certificate Authorities. All you need is a bad Certificate Authority to be trusted and a lot of bad stuff can happen. And it appears we've got yet another example.

A message on Mozilla's security policy mailing list notes that a free certificate authority named WoSign appeared to be doing some pretty bad stuff, including handing out certificates for a base domain if someone merely had control over a subdomain. This was discovered by accident, but then tested on GitHub... and it worked.

In June 2015, an applicant found a problem with WoSign's free certificate service, which allowed them to get a certificate for the base domain if they were able to prove control of a subdomain.

The reporter proved the problem in two ways. They accidentally discovered it when trying to get a certificate for med.ucf.edu and mistakenly also applied for www.ucf.edu, which was approved. They then confirmed the problem by using their control of theiraccount.github.com/theiraccount.github.io to get a cert for github.com, github.io, and www.github.io.

They reported this to WoSign, giving only the Github certificate as an example. That cert was revoked and the vulnerability was fixed. However recently, they got in touch with Google to note that the ucf.edu cert still had not been revoked almost a year later.

As you can imagine, this should be a cause for quite some concern:

The lack of revocation of the ucf.edu certificate (still unrevoked at time of writing, although it may have been by time of posting) strongly suggests that WoSign either did not or could not search their issuance databases for other occurrences of the same problem. Mozilla considers such a search a basic part of the response to disclosure of a vulnerability which causes misissuance, and expects CAs to keep records detailed enough to make it possible.

Mozilla also noted that WoSign never informed it of the earlier misissuance either. This is a pretty big mistake. The Mozilla post also calls out some questionable activity by WoSign in backdating certificates, but this first point is the really troubling one.

I recognize that until a better system is found, certificate authorities issuing certificates is about all we have right now for web security -- but, once again, it really seems like we need to be moving to a better solution.

Filed Under: certificate authority, https, security, ssl, subdomains
Companies: github, mozilla, wosign

Super Slimey: Comodo Tries To Trademark 'Let's Encrypt' [Updated]

from the that's-just-bad dept

See the update at the end

Almost two years ago, we excitedly wrote about the announcement behind Let's Encrypt, a free certificate authority that was focused on dramatically lowering the hurdles towards protecting much more of the internet with HTTPS encrypted connections. It took a while to launch, but it finally did and people have been gobbling up those certificates at a rapid rate and getting more and more of the web encrypted. This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, it appears the old guard of certificate authorities doesn't like this very much. Comodo, which has provided certificates for quite some time (and, in fact, is where Techdirt's certificate comes from) has apparently, somewhat ridiculously, been trying to trademark versions of "Let's Encrypt." The most troubling one is the one on purely "Let's Encrypt," but the other two (Comodo Let's Encrypt and Let's Encrypt with Comodo) are equally problematic -- especially since (as Comodo admits directly) it's never used that phrase in offering its existing certificates.

This seems like a clear situation where Comodo is seeking to confuse the market -- and thus the clear case where trademark law actually makes some sense. As we've said basically forever, trademark is quite different than copyrights and patents, in that it was really designed as a consumer protection law, to keep consumers from being tricked into buying something that they believe is from a different entity. Trademarks are widely and frequently abused, but there are times where the original intent of consumer protection makes sense, and this seems like one of them. What's incredible is that when Let's Encrypt reached out to Comodo about this, the company refused to abandon the attempt to trademark these names.

Since March of 2016 we have repeatedly asked Comodo to abandon their “Let’s Encrypt” applications, directly and through our attorneys, but they have refused to do so. We are clearly the first and senior user of “Let’s Encrypt” in relation to Internet security, including SSL/TLS certificates – both in terms of length of use and in terms of the widespread public association of that brand with our organization.

If necessary, we will vigorously defend the Let’s Encrypt brand we’ve worked so hard to build. That said, our organization has limited resources and a protracted dispute with Comodo regarding its improper registration of our trademarks would significantly and unnecessarily distract both organizations from the core mission they should share: creating a more secure and privacy-respecting Web. We urge Comodo to do the right thing and abandon its “Let’s Encrypt” trademark applications so we can focus all of our energy on improving the Web.

At the very least, this kind of stupid stunt has me reconsidering if we should ever use Comodo's certificates on our site going forward. We've been a happy Comodo customer for many years, but I hate supporting bullies. Update: And... of course, after this goes public, Comodo suddenly backs down. Of course that doesn't explain why it refused to do so when asked months ago.

Filed Under: certificate authority, certificates, competition, https, let's encrypt, trademark
Companies: comodo, let's encrypt

Lenovo In Denial: Insists There's No Security Problem With Superfish -- Which Is Very, Very Wrong.

from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-superfish dept

Late last night, people started buzzing on Twitter about the fact that Lenovo, makers of the famous Thinkpad laptops, had been installing a really nasty form of adware on those machines called Superfish. Many news stories started popping up about this, again, focusing on the adware. But putting adware on a computer, while ethically questionable and a general pain in the ass, is not the real problem here. The problem is that the adware in question, Superfish, has an astoundingly stupid way of working that effectively allows for a very easy man in the middle attack on any computer with the software installed, making it a massive security hole that is insanely dangerous.

Lenovo's response? Basically to shrug its shoulders and say it doesn't understand why anyone's that upset. This is because whoever wrote Lenovo's statement on this is completely clueless about computer security.

We have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not find any evidence to substantiate security concerns.

Bullshit. That's really the only response that should be said to that line. Lenovo focuses on the reasons why many people normally hate adware: that it tracks what you're doing and sends info back to third parties. That's not what Superfish does, so Lenovo doesn't see what the big deal is. Superfish, which was just recently ranked 64th by Forbes in its list of "Most Promising American Companies," tries to watch what you're surfing, and when you see certain images, the service injects other offerings for similar (or the same) products. In theory, if one chose to use such a product, you could see why it could be useful. But automatically putting it on computers is a different thing all together.

The real problem is in how Superfish deals with HTTPS protected sites. Since, in theory, it shouldn't be able to see the images on those sites, it appears that Superfish came up with what it must have believed was a clever workaround: it just installs a root HTTPS certificate, that it signs itself, to pretend that any HTTPS page you're visiting is perfectly legitimate. For many years, we've pointed out why the HTTPS system with certificate authorities is open to a giant man in the middle attack via any certificate authority willing to grant a fake certificate -- and here we basically have Lenovo enabling this questionable company to go hogwild with this exact kind of MITM attack. Basically, EVERY SINGLE HTTPS SITE that you visit was a victim of this kind of MITM attack -- solely for the purpose of interjecting Superfish ads. In fact, some have suggested it could apply to VPNs as well. Basically this is a massively dangerous security hole with wide ranging implications. And Lenovo says they don't see why.

And, even beyond that, it's implemented incredibly stupidly -- in a way that is ridiculously dangerous. That's because it appears that the private key use for the Superfish certificate is the same on basically every install of this software. And it didn't take very long at all for security folks, such as Robert Graham, to crack the password, meaning that it's now incredibly easy to get access to information someone thinks is encrypted. As Graham notes, the password is "komodia" which just so happens to also be the name of a company that "redirects" HTTPS traffic (for spying on kids and such).

This is a massive and ridiculous security threat, and Lenovo is completely brushing it off as nothing big. As many have noted, people have been complaining about the adware components of the software for months now, and Lenovo announced that it was stopping installs, because some people didn't like the way the software created popups and such -- but with no mention of the massive security problems. And, even now, the company doesn't seem willing to admit to them.

Furthermore, the company doesn't even seem willing to say what machines it installed them on, or provide people with instructions on how to protect themselves (simply uninstalling Superfish won't do it). This is a huge mess. I've personally been a very loyal Lenovo Thinkpad customer for years, having bought many, many laptops. In fact, just a couple months ago -- right in the middle of the period of when Superfish was being preloaded -- I bought a new Thinkpad laptop, though it appears that mine is not one that includes Superfish. Still, Lenovo created a huge and dangerous mess, and they don't seem to recognize it at all. This kind of fuck up is much worse than the whole Sony rootkit thing from a decade or so ago, and as with Sony then, Lenovo doesn't seem to have the slightest clue of just how badly it has put people at risk.

It doesn't take much to kill off tremendous goodwill and trust, and Lenovo may have just done so with it's pitiful reaction here. It's one thing for Lenovo to have made the stupid decision to install this kind of adware/bloatware. It's a second thing to not realize the security implications of it. However, it's another thing entirely, once it's been pointed out to Lenovo to then deny that this is a security risk. Lenovo screwed up big time here, and mostly in the way it's responded to the mess it created.

Filed Under: adware, certificate authority, concerns, https, man in the middle, privacy, security, superfish, tls
Companies: komodia, lenovo, superfish

Will New Free Certificate Authority Help Or Hinder Online Security?

from the first-things-first dept

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about Let's Encrypt, an interesting new project from the EFF, Mozilla and others to set up a free certificate authority (CA) that will allow anyone running a website to offer encrypted connections. That sounds like a great idea, since it will make snooping on web traffic much harder. But a post (on LinkedIn, unfortunately) by Alexander Hanff, Chief Privacy Officer at Connect In Private, wonders if it might actually make things worse. Here's why:

Creating a new Super Certificate Authority is the equivalent of painting a huge red target onto the backs of all the people who use it.

Let's not mix our words here, it will become a target -- that much is completely indisputable, it would be utterly naive to believe the US Government will not target this new CA with court orders. What's more, given the historical evidence, there is a strong chance that such orders will be for "super master keys" allowing them to pretend to be whomever they like [for man-in-the-middle attacks] and it will be done under the guise of National Security because of course a CA which provides free certificates for everyone is (in the eyes of law enforcement) a hotbed for criminals and terrorists -- why on earth would a terrorist pay Verisign for an SSL certificate, leaving a paper trail, if they can obtain an anonymous certificate for free from Let's Encrypt?

Techdirt asked the EFF to respond to this concern, and Peter Eckersley, the organization's Technology Projects Director, replied as follows:

Mr Hanff is right to be concerned about structural flaws in the CA infrastructure, but he hasn't understood the problem. This is something we've been working on for years: https://eff.org/observatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VAreZZhue4 and we certainly wouldn't have picked a design to make the situation worse.

Anyone who looks at the CA infrastructure is going to think, "oh, there are expensive high security CAs, and weaker low security CAs, and hundreds of others run by various corporations and governments, I'd better pick one I can trust". But it turns out not to matter which one *you* pick, because our web browsers have been designed to trust hundreds of them. So even if you buy from the one with the best combination of security and jurisdictional robustness, a would-be man-in-the-middle attacker will pick a weak one to use against you. We've seen this play out for instance with the Iranian attack on Gmail via a CA in the Netherlands, and a Turkish CA issuing improper certs for Google.

Let's Encrypt's first mission will be to solve the grand problem of HTTPS, which is that hundreds of millions of sites don't use it at all. But it will also be engineered to begin addressing the structural flaws in the whole CA marketplace. For sites that it want it, we'll assist in using mechanisms like pinning to protect against the hundreds of other CAs that the site isn't using (pinning lets a site declare that only a small and specified number of CAs can sign certs for it). And for our own CA, we will use Certificate Transparency or equivalent mechanisms to ensure that if our operations were ever compromised or compelled in any way, that would be recorded and rapidly visible to the whole Internet.

As that points out, the first problem is to get people using encrypted connections; after that, we need to work on those "structural flaws in the CA infrastructure" that Hanff and Eckersley agree are a serious issue that needs addressing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: alexander hanff, certificate authority, certificates, let's encrypt, privacy, security, surveillance
Companies: eff, let's encrypt

EFF, Others Launch New Free Security Certificate Authority To 'Dramatically Increase Encrypted Internet Traffic'

from the very-cool dept

The EFF and Mozilla along with some others, have teamed up to announce "Let's Encrypt" which is a new, free, certificate authority that is hoping to dramatically increase encrypted internet traffic when it launches next summer. The effort is being overseen by the Internet Security Research Group, which is the non-profit coalition of folks contributing to this effort. Not only is the effort going to offer free certificates, but also make it much easier to enable encryption. We've argued for a long time about the importance of increasing encryption online, so it's great to see this effort.

Filed Under: certificate authority, encryption, https, let's encrypt, security, ssl
Companies: cisco, eff, internet security research group, mozilla

Facebook Joins Tor, And The Dark Web Gets A Little More Useful (If A Little Less Cool)

from the good-news dept

Just a couple months ago, we wrote about how the folks behind Tor were looking for ways to deal with the fact that much of the web treats Tor visitors differently. It's a tough problem to solve, as we noted, because for all the benefits that Tor provides by allowing people to be anonymous, it's also very much a tool that is abused by some for nefarious purposes, including spamming and attacks. For sites that have any sort of heuristic systems in place (including us at Techdirt), it often defaults to treating many, if not all, Tor users as second-class citizens. This isn't an easy problem to solve, by any means. We've done our best to train our systems to minimize the hassle for Tor users, and yet they are still more likely to run into issues than non-Tor users (sometimes because of upstream efforts). We're certainly watching this effort closely, in hopes that we can benefit from it as well.

However, it looks like Facebook has taken a rather bold move to help Tor users: setting up its very own Tor hidden service, effectively creating a special "hidden" Tor version of Facebook that is designed for Tor users. Yes, Facebook has joined the dark web. It may not seem as cool as various dark markets and such, but it actually is rather important in helping to validate the use of Tor and the fact that not everything on Tor hidden services are about selling drugs or hiring hitmen, as some reports seem to imply.

This is a pretty big move, because Facebook was rather aggressive in treating tor users badly in the past, sometimes accusing them of hacking their own account, kicking them out or just displaying stuff weirdly. Obviously, users logged into Facebook over Tor are identifying themselves to Facebook, but it does provide more security and privacy for others, and works more seamlessly for those who wish to use Tor regularly.

As Runa Sandvik also notes, this is the first time that a certificate authority has issued a legitimate SSL certificate for a .onion address (Facebook is at https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/ in case you were wondering). Having both of these things happen at once may, as Andy Greenberg jokes, feel sort of like when your parents joined Facebook, but it also, hopefully, is the beginning of more widespread recognition that the Tor hidden services can be useful -- and not just for questionable enterprises. Hopefully others follow Facebook's lead.

Filed Under: certificate authority, dark web, ssl, tor
Companies: facebook